


Yours, With All My Heart

by Eienvine



Series: Yours [2]
Category: Enola Holmes (2020)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Missing Scene, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:15:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27605444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eienvine/pseuds/Eienvine
Summary: The Marquess of Basilwether has just received the most astonishing letter of his life.He needs to get to London. Right now.Missing scene from "Yours Truly."
Relationships: Enola Holmes/Viscount "Tewky" Tewksbury
Series: Yours [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2018234
Comments: 34
Kudos: 272





	Yours, With All My Heart

**Author's Note:**

> So I just really wanted to see what happened after Tewky received Enola's letter of confession in Yours Truly. So I wrote it. :D With thanks to fannish92, who commented on Yours Truly, "I kind of imagine him letting a high pitch sound that only dogs could hear and just running straight to Baker Street" which is what made me decide to finally get around to writing this, and which inspired Tewky's immediate reaction to the letter. :D
> 
> I've written yet another missing scene (the reaction of Tewky and Enola's families) which I will post some time soon.

. . . . . .

_Yours, with all my heart,_

_Enola_

There’s a faint sort of high-pitched noise coming from somewhere, and it takes a moment for William Linfield’s addled brain to realize it’s coming from his own mouth. But he’s genuinely not certain he knows how to stop. The entire universe has just come crashing to a halt and then collapsed, with alarming rapidity, into the letter he holds in his shaking hands.

_I want nothing in this world more than for you to rush back to London and kiss me again._

It’s the ringing of the grandfather clock in his study—three ponderous chimes—that finally shakes him from his stupor and send him rocketing into frenzied action.

Enola would like him to rush back to London and kiss her again. And far be it from William to disappoint her.

His mother and uncle are both out of the house on various social calls, and there simply is not time to wait for them—or to pack an overnight bag—or to stop for breath— So he scribbles a note for his mother and hands it to the butler as he pelts out the front door toward the stables.

Reliable old Webster, who has run the stables since William was a lad, is nowhere to be found; it’s young Jim who greets the master of Basilwether House, which William is glad of. Webster is cautious and reasonable, but Jim is young, a little reckless, and easily motivated, and that's what this situation needs.

“There’s a tenner in it for you if you can get me to the station before the train arrives,” William says without preamble.

Jim stares, wide-eyed, but then—no doubt prompted by the promise of ten pounds—jumps into action. “How long do we have?”

“Twenty minutes. Fifteen, to give me time to buy a ticket.”

“No luggage?”

William shakes his head.

“We’d best ride, then,” says Jim, already hurrying toward the saddles. “I can lead both horses home after.” He glances back toward his employer with an impish look in his eyes. “I hope you’re ready to gallop.”

Ah, so apparently William has not done as good a job as he’d hoped at hiding from his stable staff what a mediocre equestrian he is.

The boy knows his work well, and despite two horses needing to be saddled, William is to the station in fifteen minutes and seated on the train in twenty. The train is pulling away from the Greenley station before it occurs to him that he has neglected to bring hat, gloves, or coat. He just laughs at himself; honestly, he’s lucky he remembered to bring money for the ticket. He'll be fine, even if the November day is a bit brisk.

He whiles away the forty minutes between Greenley and London by pulling the letter—that glorious, unbelievable, life-changing letter—from his pocket and reading it eighty or ninety times, his eyes lingering over Enola’s beautiful, if hurried, script until he has the words memorized. Enola, in love with him all this time. Enola, unable to stop thinking of their undercover kiss.

Come to think of it, he’s never stopped thinking about that kiss either.

 _I know I am in no way suited to be the Marchioness of Basilwether,_ she wrote: that means she’s thought about marrying him. Now, granted, her conclusion after thinking about it was that she is unsuited to be a marchioness, but he is determined not to give up until he has convinced her that he doesn’t _care,_ he only wants _her,_ he has _always_ wanted her, did she not understand that when he wrote to her that he preferred a wife he truly loved and respected over one who’d been raised to be nobility, he meant he preferred her?

Suddenly giddy with joy (and fear and anticipation and cold), he re-folds the letter and presses it to his lips.

. . . . . .

It begins to rain just outside London, and William curses himself again for forgetting a hat or coat. But he’s certainly not going to slow his journey now to fetch one. His lack of luggage means that the second the train stops at the St. Pancras station, he can be the first onto the platform; he pelts outside and into the rain, where he sets his sights on the nearest of the cabs lined up on the street: a Hansom cab, two-wheeled and fast.

“221 Baker Street, as quickly as you can,” he says, and to his surprise the driver laughs.

“Off to visit Sherlock Holmes?” he asks. “You’re not the first person I’ve taken from his station to that address.”

“But I doubt if it was for quite the same reason,” William mutters to himself as the cab rumbles into motion. The vehicle is only partially enclosed, and he sits on his hands to keep them warm and resigns himself to getting even more wet than he currently is as the conveyance makes its slow way through the city.

He's been thinking since he left home about what he'll do when he finds Enola, but honestly he still has no plan (other than kissing her, of course). That’s unusual for him; usually he prefers walking into situations prepared. Even when he ran away from home all those years ago—though it was a fairly spur-of-the-moment decision, he still sketched out the plan for smuggling himself in a carpet bag and seeking work at Covent Garden. But he couldn't possibly make a sensible plan now: his mind is skipping about like a ball in a game of tennis, bouncing here and there too rapidly for him to think properly.

He’s in luck when he reaches 221 Baker Street; here’s Mrs. Hudson now, leaving the building with an umbrella held overhead. “Your lordship!” she declares in surprise. “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen you around these parts.”

“I must speak to Miss Holmes,” he informs her, calling on all his training in polite deportment to hold back his nervous energy, which is threatening to break free and crash over his companion like a tidal wave. “Is she in?”

“Upstairs,” the lady confirms, and unlocks the door she just locked. William bolts inside—not caring for once if he has been impolite in not bidding Mrs. Hudson goodbye first—and pounds up the stairs he has come to know as well as his own. And when he reaches the front door of 221B, standing open as it so often does, his heart leaps into his throat.

Because there in the parlor, standing by the window, is Enola, looking achingly lovely in a white dress he’s often told her he likes. She turns away from the rainy scene outside the window to look up at him, eyes wide, and he can read nervousness there but no surprise at seeing him. She must have calculated it all, he realizes: when she could expect her letter to arrive at Basilwether House and when the next train to London would come through Greenley station and how long that train would take to reach London and how long it would take a cab to travel from St. Pancras to Baker Street. She must have known that if he decided to come to London, this would be the moment he would arrive.

All this passes through his mind in that first moment as their eyes meet. In the second moment, he is striding across the room, with a resolve he barely knew himself capable of, to cup Enola’s face in his hands and kiss her.

She gives a little start of surprise, and for a sudden horrible moment he thinks something has gone wrong—she’s changed her mind or she never wrote that letter at all, it was a cruel prank by someone else—but then she breaks the kiss to lean back and stare into his face, searching for something there. And suddenly it makes sense to him. Maybe it’s not that she changed her mind; maybe it’s that Enola—confident, clever Enola Holmes—is uncertain for once. Maybe she can’t quite believe, as he can’t, that she should be so lucky as to have the person she loves reciprocate.

At the thought, he finds himself grinning; Enola slowly returns it, her whole body lighting up with joy. And this time it’s her that kisses him, looping her arms around his neck to pull him close. Is it possible to be so happy that your heart just gives out? Because William thinks he’s in danger of this kiss having an irrevocable effect on that organ.

He tells himself at first to be careful of her hair, as she obviously put extra effort into it today, but ten seconds later he has utterly changed his tune because that hair is soft and lovely and his fingertips quite insist upon burying themselves in it. Enola shivers and pulls him closer.

This is nothing like the MacDonald case kiss. Of course that kiss absolutely bowled him over when it occurred, but still, it was stiff, hurried, entirely for show. This is a thousand times better, and the thought occurs to him that if Enola doesn’t agree to marry him after this, so that he can kiss her all the time, he will probably never recover.

A few long moments (or one short eternity) later, Enola pulls away enough to breathe, though she keeps her fingers curled against the back of his neck. “I suppose,” she says to his tie—she is not (perhaps is incapable of) meeting his eyes at the moment—“this means you got my letter?”

He nods emphatically, and she’s close enough to him that his nose brushes her hair. “It is now my most prized possession.”

She gives a little laugh, a breathy exhalation of disbelief and relief, and the reminder that she has been longing for him as he has for her rushes through his veins like lightning and makes him brave. So he cups her jaw with his hands and presses a kiss to her forehead. “Enola Holmes.” He presses his lips to her cheek. “I have loved you—” a kiss to her other cheek— “since the day you came to find me at Covent Garden.”

Enola looks up at him, eyes wide, clearly turning over this information in her head. “That long? Why did you never say anything?”

He laughs a little. “Why would I have? You'd made it perfectly clear that you had no use for romance or marriage, and I could tell that if I spoke to you of it then, not only would you have laughed at me, you probably would have started avoiding me altogether.”

She hesitates, then admits, “You may have a point.”

He hardly knows how to say what he wants to say next; it is absolutely miraculous that Enola is letting him kiss her at all, and the moment feels so fragile, and he fears doing something to push her away again. But at the same time, there is something he desperately needs to hear from her. “But . . . now you . . . are feeling all right with all this?”

She looks at him curiously. “I just kissed you, didn’t I?”

He nods quickly and decides to drop the subject; the last thing he wants to do is annoy her right now. But Enola, in that incisive way of hers, seems to hear what he’s not saying. She hesitates, staring at the knot of his tie for a few long moments, and then she looks up at William, her clear brown eyes fixed unerringly on his. She takes a deep breath, and he can read the vulnerability behind her firm gaze when she says, “I love you, if that’s what you’re asking.” And then she cracks a smile, apparently needing to break the intensity of moment by adding, “Marquess of Bothersomeshire.”

William’s heart soars and he kisses her again.

He hardly knows how long they stand there, trading kisses and embraces; he just knows that he’s glad that Mrs. Hudson has gone out, for if she suspected what was happening in the parlor of 221B, she would likely insist on chaperoning them. Neither he nor Enola knows quite what they are doing—they are each other’s first . . . everything—but their touches grow more confident and assured as time passes.

The thing that finally breaks them apart is Enola sliding her hands over William’s shoulders, then exclaiming in surprise. She pulls away from him to look up in his face. “You are quite soaked from the rain,” she informs him. “Aren’t you cold?”

He is quite tempted to respond that after those kisses, he suspects he will never be cold again, but at that moment a shiver ripples through him, and Enola’s brow lowers in concern. “I’ll get you something warm,” she informs him. “Take that wet jacket off.”

She returns a few moments later with a dressing gown that clearly belongs to Sherlock; it’s rather too large for William—Sherlock Holmes, despite being the brilliant intellectual type, has the build of a circus strongman—but it fits better than anything from Enola’s closet would. Then she leads him to the sofa and makes him sit while she takes his hands in hers, one at a time, and chafes them to make them warm again.

“I thought your hands were rather cold earlier,” she confesses, her gaze fixed on their hands, “but I did not want to say anything.”

“Oh?”

She looks up him with mischief in her eyes. “I did not want you to stop kissing me.”

And William laughs, even as he sends a heartfelt prayer of thanks heavenward for this extraordinary turn of events.

They sit in silence for a while, listening to the rain pound against the windows and watching Enola rub warmth back into William’s hands, and in time her movement slows, and then stops. There’s a question that must be asked, William knows perfectly well, but he cannot bring himself to ask it. For if anything will frighten Enola off, it is that question.

Fortunately for him, Enola is scared of very little in this world. After a few moments of staring down at their joined hands, she looks up at William and asks the question he cannot bring himself to voice. “What now?”

“I do not know,” he confesses. “I . . . do not want to ask more of you than you are willing to give. I do not want to frighten you off.”

And dear Enola just rolls her eyes. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily, Viscount Tewkesbury, Marquess of Basilwether,” she says, mimicking that conversation at the gate at the Houses of Parliament all those years ago, and he can’t help the relieved grin that breaks over his face.

She smiles back, but then her expression grows solemn. “So what now?”

Their hands are still clasped, resting on the cushion between them (for they have both turned sideways to face each other on the sofa), and William lifts her hands to his lips to press kisses to her knuckles. It makes her smile, and he lets that smile give him the courage to speak. “I would like to marry you,” he murmurs to her knuckles, and lifts his eyes to hers. The look he sees there is inscrutable, and he wishes he knew what she was thinking. “I would marry you tomorrow, if you’d let me. But if you wanted to wait, I would wait.”

She takes in a breath. “Would you?” she asks steadily.

He quirks a grin at her. “I’ve waited five years for you, Enola; I suppose I can wait longer, if it means that when you do marry me, you do so with your whole heart, without reservation.”

Her face grows solemn again. “I know nothing about entertaining or being a hostess. I am in no way suited to be your wife—I am in no way suited to become anyone’s wife, really, but particularly yours. And I will not give up my work.”

His heart sinks. “Is that your way of saying no?” he asks, and moves to pull his arms back to his sides.

But to his surprise, she tightens her grasp on his hands. “No,” she says firmly. “That is my way of asking you to convince me that it's a good idea. That we won’t ruin each other’s lives.”

William stares. And then he grins. And if there’s one thing years of public school and Parliamentary service have taught him, it’s persuasive speaking. “I would never in a thousand years ask you to give up your work,” he informs her. “It’s who you are; I could no sooner ask you to cut off your own hand. We will travel often between Basilwether House and London, and you can work as much as you choose. As for being a marchioness, my mother can see to most of the entertaining and hostessing at first, and if you choose to learn, she can teach you—you’re the most brilliant person I know, so I’m certain you can learn it quickly—and if you’d rather not . . . well, Mother is rather good at that sort of thing; I have no doubt she’d be happy to carry on. And I don’t worry a bit about how you would deal with social situations; I’ve seen you undercover enough to know that you can be very proper and very impressive when you choose to be. You would make a brilliant, eloquent marchioness, and together we would make the world a better place, solving crimes and influencing laws. And we would be blissfully happy together.”

And he leans forward and presses a quick but tender kiss to her lips. “Don’t you know that when I wrote to you that I could only marry a woman I truly loved and respected, I meant you?”

She gives him a sardonic look. “You also said you’d never find such a woman.”

“No, I said I’d feared I’d never find such a woman who was willing to marry me. Since you seemed thoroughly unwilling.”

She looks surprised, and then thoughtful, with a warmth in her eyes and a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. She examines him a long few moments, while he tries not to simply die of the uncertainty and the waiting, and then she nods decisively. “Not unwilling,” she corrects him. “Not anymore.”

He blinks. “So . . . you’re saying . . .”

Enola rolls her eyes fondly. “Yes, Tewky, I would rather like to marry you.”

Relief and joy crash over him like a tidal wave. “You’re certain?”

“Couldn’t be more so,” she informs him briskly. “Now, are you going to kiss me or just keep staring?”

He is more than happy to oblige. And he is pleased that, when they finally break apart, Enola’s shaky voice tells him that she’s as affected as he is. “How soon can you get a marriage license?”

William blinks, and then grins. “Quite soon,” he tells her. “You—you don’t want to wait?”

“Of course not,” she says reasonably. “It’s enormously good of you to offer, but I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you and I don’t see any reason not to start at once. Unless you want to wait?”

“No,” he blurts out immediately, and she grins.

“Then let’s begin the rest of our lives together as soon as possible,” she says. “You’ll be back in London for the opening of Parliament in February, will you not? It seems silly for us to continue to live apart then. So why shouldn’t we marry before February?”

The shock is wearing off, and there’s a sort of giddiness burrowing into William’s sternum, and he can’t help the laughter in his voice when he says, “Indeed. And January is a dreary time of year; perhaps we should marry at Christmas.”

Enola grins. “I would be happy to marry at Christmas,” she says. “Now, what is so funny?”

“I just—I can’t believe—this morning I was sitting at home in Bedfordshire, convinced you thought of me only as a friend, and now I’m here with you and we’re planning to be married in only a month. It’s extraordinary.”

That makes her smile, then laugh. “It is rather a delightful outcome, isn’t it?” she asks.

He grins back, then reaches out and tucks a loose curl behind her ear—not because it was doing any harm where it was, but because he’s now allowed to touch her. Because Enola Holmes is his fiancée. Because Enola Holmes has agreed to marry him in one month and live in his home and grow old by his side.

It is indeed the most delightful of outcomes.

They’re so lost in each other that they don’t notice the footsteps on the stairs, meaning they both jump in surprise when Sherlock speaks from the doorway. “What’s all this, then?” he asks, with amusement in his voice. And then, sounding rather more confused, “Basilwether, are you wearing my dressing gown?”

Enola laughs, then climbs off the sofa, tugging on William’s hand to bring him to stand beside her. “Sherlock,” she says happily, and squeezes William’s hand. “We’ve got something to tell you.”

. . . . . .

fin


End file.
